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GLOBAL PHARMA COMPANY
DRIVES GREATER ROI FROM SAS
You’ve chosen SAS to support your
business and want to see a good
return on investment. And you want
to ensure your SAS community gets
the most out of the software.
Organizations are now discovering
that creating a SAS competency
centre is a fast and effective way of
improving in-house knowledge,
quality and user support.
 Quotation |
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“Competency centres mean you can optimize and leverage your SAS investments. Organizations
already have SAS knowledge but don’t always get the most out of it. It’s about closing the gap
between SAS and the business people using it.”
Christopher Cieslok
BI Consultant, Business & Decision |
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Putting best practice into action
In Switzerland, Business & Decision
operates within a SAS Business
Intelligence Competency Centre (BICC)
to support business-critical studies in
a major pharmaceutical company.
A key need was ensuring standards
were adhered to, including mandatory
requirements from regulators like
the Food and Drug Administration.
Business & Decision has specific
expertise delivering SAS solutions
for pharma and contract research
organisations, with a client list that
includes major players in the Life
Science Industry.
“Every company with SAS needs to
implement and maintain the software
while SAS communities, both technical
and business, work best if they’re trained
and supported in the right ways,”
says Christopher Cieslok, Consultant
at Business & Decision and Technical
Lead in Switzerland for the pharma
company’s BICC. He says every company
with SAS can gain significant
benefits by establishing a high quality
in-house support centre, including time
and cost savings delivered through
greater competency in the use and
management of SAS.
A major benefit for the pharma company –
the BICC has been in place for five years –
is that it has a single point of contact for
everything SAS-related, including:
- License management, particular useful
for larger organizations with multiple
uses of SAS
- Provision of a detailed and evolving
SAS knowledge base
- A standards-based quality management
approach for SAS deployments
- Standardization across common
activities and procedures
- Easier maintenance and the ability to
deliver proactive support
- Easier maintenance and the ability to
deliver proactive support
- Improved resource management
through, for example, the ability to
detect and minimize overlapping work
As a result, C. Cieslok says the company
can optimize its use of internal knowledge
and adopt a best practice approach that
combines internal control with external
resources. “It’s also important that user
expectations are understood and
managed. You need to ensure the BICC
always meets business demands and
user needs.”
Providing enhanced user support is a
critical area. The BICC gives the company
peace of mind that the SAS community is
supported at every step, from appropriate
training to online support tools, effective
systems administration, and responsive
helpdesk support. “Maintaining strong
communications is vital,” says C. Cieslok.
“We use the intranet, run user groups and
discussion forums, produce a newsletter,
and so on.” If any problems arise requiring
support, ticket tracing keeps users in the
know.
He concludes, “For organizations that use
SAS, the tasks supported by the BICC
have to be done anyway. What the centre
does is to clarify, organize and optimize
those tasks around SAS – without
increasing your budget or the resources
required.”
“Competence means having the ability
or qualifications to perform a task, and
is based on a mix of knowledge, skills
and attitude,” continues C. Cieslok.
When considering a BICC, he says
you need to examine where SAS is
used – in marketing or in development,
for example – and its scope. This
might include drug development or
specific uses like data mining. And
finally, how strategic SAS is to the
business. “We can then provide ways
to use SAS more efficiently, in this
case helping people performing
studies in life sciences. It’s not really
important how many users you have
or what platform you’re using.” Using
SAS doesn’t mean you have to follow
a BICC approach – rather, the centre
follows the organization’s needs to
deliver greater value from SAS.
“The first step is creating a task list in
line with your usage and requirements
in SAS - it’s essential to ‘know your
customers’,” says Cieslok. This means
analysing current processes around
SAS, defining tasks according to
these processes, mapping and moving
processes to the task list, and then
assigning tasks. “The same approach
can be used for organizations large or
small – you don’t need to create a
‘SAS Department’. You can develop
a virtual team, assigning people to the
centre on demand.”
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| Facts |
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Business Issue
A major pharmaceutical company with
a wide range of SAS solutions wants to
ensure all necessary standards are
met, better support its SAS community
and achieve the best ROI.
Solution
A SAS Business Intelligence
Competency Centre (BICC) operated
by SAS partner Business & Decision.
Benefits
Relocating responsibilities from IT
and business units reduces pressure
on staff and frees them to focus on
other strategic activities; SAS solutions
are permanently evaluated so the
organization is in a stronger position
to exploit them in the future. |
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